3 amis

What I've mainly been doing at night is going out with other Sciences Po students to Sciences Po-sponsored activities. During the day (i.e., during my class) (bien sûr), the Bureau des Elévès plans museum tours, guided visits of famous Parisian districts, and lunches in Belleville, but somewhat (ok, completely) unsurprisingly, the nighttime excursions are always bar nights and parties at clubs. So tonight my friends and I decided we would go see a movie. Our first choice, Paris je t'aime wasn't playing anywhere on the weekend, just during the week (France, come on), so instead we opted for a comedy we'd seen advertised: 3 amis .

It was really the only thing my 4 amis and I had seen advertised (absolutely everywhere). The taglines were pretty standard: What is this strange relation we call friendship? This story is of love without sleeping together. And of course, on the poster: A friend is priceless... but can cost a lot.

Surprisingly, that last line is not only a general, vague statement about l'amité, but perhaps a reference to the fact that one ami pawns his watch and steals from his job in order to pay a prostitute to date his recently divorced friend. Other than a few other touches like that that were strange enough to be unexpected, the whole thing was pretty predictable-- not terribly funny, but okay, and simple enough that even though I couldn't understand everything they were saying, I was able to follow the story without problems. Not bad for something watched on impulse, though maybe not quite worth 9 euro-- picking a theater on the Champs-Elysees was perhaps not the most cost-effective decision I've made since I've been here.

It was a fun place to meet up with my friends, though. It's definitely the most touristy place I've been in Paris so far-- everywhere there were tour buses, people wearing fakey berets (in the metro I saw about a dozen pepto-bismol colored ones on a group of Brits), and of course, hundreds and hundreds of cameras. I've never lived somewhere that attracts tourists before, so I'm still at the stage where my annoyance at them is mixed with amusement. On one hand, being surrounded by them is frustrating, and often causes delays-- they walk slowly, they stop in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures, and they uniformly ignore or are ignorant of the rule about escalators: if you want to stand still, keep to the right so that people who actually have somewhere to go can pass you. I can't blame people for not knowing these things, because I'm sure there are a lot of really impolite/ignorant things I do here, but it's still quite difficult not to sigh loudly or say some rude words.

Staying (seemingly) polite isn't too hard, though, as long as the tourists manage to make themselves hilarious, which pretty much happens without fail. The most common way is by photographing everything in sight. While I waited to meet a near the Arc de Triomphe, a bus pulled up, and every tourist who disembarked started taking pictures as soon as their feet hit the ground. Not of the Arc, mind you, or the Tour Eiffel glowing in the distance, but of metro signs, pigeons, and park benches. C'est comprehensible, mind you, but paired with shrieks of, "Omigod, take my picture by the Disney Store! A Disney Store in France!", c'est aussi pretty awful-- the only thing you can do is laugh.

Of course, this doesn't just happen on the Champs-Elysées-- anywhere where there are notable and interesting things to see, there will be tourists blocking the view and snapping pictures with their camera phones.


"There but for the grace of God..."